142 
AX OLD-FASIIIOXED STAMPEDE. 
I never before engaged in such a scrambling race, — 
tlirougli the knee-deep water, into holes that were waist- 
deep, tumbling over sunken rocks, and all the while the 
utmost noise and confusion prevailing. 
As we thus regained the use of our eyes, legs, and 
voices, the bear seemed suddenly seized with fear. He 
turned short in his advance upon the desperate group 
that awaited his attack with uplifted guns, and urged his 
confused and staggering flight toward the sheltering 
brushwood of the precipitous hill-side. 
Whether he shrank before the blazing eye of man’s 
angry intellect at bay, or fled from the confused and un- 
usual uproar which we created in his rear, it is hard to 
say. Certain it is, however, that he did fly, and, as he 
turned, we saw the uo-longer-expected flash of Williams’s 
faithless gun and heard the whistle of its misdirected 
ball. Another flash from his remaining barrel, another 
whistle of its uncertain messenger, and all hope of stop- 
ping the bear’s flight was gone. Their ammunition was 
all expended, and we could not use ours from the asto- 
nishing fact that Lawton and Bruin were now exactly in 
line. This excited huntsman no sooner saw that Wil- 
liams’s balls had passed the retreating bear without dis- 
turbing a hair than he threw down his gun and hat and 
started in hot pursuit. Instead, therefore, of our party 
being able to stop and fire a grand volley, we were forced 
to join in the pursuit or let him and Bruin have it all to 
themselves. A general stampede, therefore, ensued, and 
such a stampede I never engaged in before. Bruin had 
evidently given up all idea of fighting, and was devoting 
his waning strength to secure his safety by flight ; and. 
